Despite all the blistering criticism from Democrats thrown Donald Trump’s way, it’s been fascinating to see many of them grudgingly acknowledge that he was mostly right on China.
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have both praised Trump for raising alarm bells about China’s geopolitical challenge. The Biden administration has retained many elements of Trump’s policies toward China.
Now, Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is speaking up about the national-security risks of the Chinese-owned social-media app, TikTok. “This is not something you would normally hear me say, but Donald Trump was right on TikTok years ago,” Warner told an Australian audience recently. “If your kids are on TikTok, if your population uses WeChat as a social-media platform, the ability for China to have undue influence is, I think, a much greater challenge and a much more immediate threat than any kind of actual, armed conflict.”
Trump tried to ban TikTok in the U.S. due to the requirement in China’s National Intelligence Law that social-media companies must “support, assist and co-operate with the state intelligence work.” He was blocked by a court.
Last Sunday, Warner told Fox News that TikTok remains an “enormous threat,” and that if Trump’s fears had been acted on it would “have been a heckuva lot easier (to control the problem) than trying to take action in November of 2022.”